Skip to content

Maximum block number too small? Potential integer rollover bug. #37

Open
@j-huff

Description

@j-huff

From my understanding of rfc9171, there isn't really a limit on the number of canonical blocks you can have. However, ION imposes a soft limit of around 255. This is because the block number is stored as a unsigned char in the ExtensionBlock struct, and selectBlkNumber similarly returns an unsigned char.

selectBlkNumber in particular could pose trouble if someone were to send a bundle containing a block number set to a multiple of 255. In that case, selectBlkNumber would return 0 due to rolling over after adding 1.

It's probably best to either impose a hard limit on the maximum block number, or store it as a uvast. According to the spec, the block number is simply for uniquely identifying blocks, so there is nothing stopping an implementation from starting their canonical block numbering from 2^64-1 instead of starting from 2 like ION does (0 and 1 are reserved for primary and payload blocks).

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions